Maratha Domination of India

Umm... Veer Savarkar was born nearly three decades into the heyday of British imperialism in India. Hindutva arose as a concept and reaction to the heavily educated Maratha, Bengali and Awadhi civil servants and middle class studying the past of their nation and understanding the past one thousand years of invasion and conquest by foreign powers.

The goal of the Maratha Empire was not to establish a ‘great Hindu Empire’. Nor was it to completely conquer the subcontinent (at least till the Bajiraos). It was to erode the political authority of the Mughal Empire. All that came alongside this was something similar to the Norman expansions that Europe saw in the 11th and 12th centuries. Though it can be easily argued that the Mughals also did exactly this, their very adherence to an Imperial bueareaucracy akin to China stopped them from achieving the same amount of cultural unity that the decentralised Maratha princes had. The lack of a powerful Peshwa or Shogun analogue alongside the Badshah meant that there was no strong position of power to unite the princes when the princelings and feudatories began jockeying for power with the British.


I mean down the road for Savarkar. If the Empire lasts, declines, and has a a revivalist demagogue figure in Savarkar.


The original goal vs the perceived goal down the road is important. There’s always the real political goal but if today in India a large segment of the population believes the purpose was to establish Hindu rule, then if the Marathas successfully unite most of the Subcontinet by ousting the Mughals, Nizam, Mysore (under Muslim rule) Oudh and Bengal, it would be with the goodwill of the Hindu populace and their liberation due to the Hindu religion affiliation. Thus this develops a conscience within majority of the state that the Maratha cause is one of Hindu nationalism, which would help the Marathas (make them Indian Prussia) centralize. After a period of troubles in a second phase (after a gen or two) Savarkar could win
 
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I mean down the road for Savarkar. If the Empire lasts, declines, and has a a revivalist demagogue figure in Savarkar.


The original goal vs the perceived goal down the road is important. There’s always the real political goal but if today in India a large segment of the population believes the purpose was to establish Hindu rule, then if the Marathas successfully unite most of the Subcontinet by ousting the Mughals, Nizam, Mysore (under Muslim rule) Oudh and Bengal, it would be with the goodwill of the Hindu populace and their liberation due to the Hindu religion affiliation. Thus this develops a conscience within majority of the state that the Maratha cause is one of Hindu nationalism, which would help the Marathas (make them Indian Prussia) centralize. After a period of troubles in a second phase (after a gen or two) Savarkar could win

But... but... the butterflies! My statement was that due to the butterfly effect any Maratha domination of India would need to be achieved by th Third Battle of Panipat. Nearly 122 years before his birth. The chance of him existing in such a timeline is little to none.

As for the rest, well the populace had become used to Muslim rulers. At the Imperial and ducal levels the rulers of UP had been Muslim for a near 300 years. And at the very base of it most of the minor landlords were still Hindu. So there wasn’t really a mind set of needing ‘liberation’ in the Hindu populace. It’s important to remember that they would resist forced conversion but such things had become very rare until Aurangzeb was crowned Emperor.
 
Then perhaps having a stronger emperor could prevent that

I’d argue the decentralised nature of the Marathas was actually one of their strong suits. For the first time the rulers of the Indian subcontinent were able to resist the Afghan hordes due to the fact the Marathas provided an equal number of irregular troops, modern rifles and regulars to improve their military. This would not have been possible without some amount of decentralisation, as most of these reforms originated from the Scindia and the Holkar families under constant duress from Afghan raiding, not the Imperial Bhonsles safely residing far away in Satara.

This is not to say that the Peshwa and the Chhatrapatis were incompetent. They simply had different priorities, such as continuing to have one of the most functional navies in the entirety of the Indian subcontinent and in the Arabian Sea, in fact the only one large anough, well equipped and funded enough to challenge European vessels.
 
But... but... the butterflies! My statement was that due to the butterfly effect any Maratha domination of India would need to be achieved by th Third Battle of Panipat. Nearly 122 years before his birth. The chance of him existing in such a timeline is little to none.

As for the rest, well the populace had become used to Muslim rulers. At the Imperial and ducal levels the rulers of UP had been Muslim for a near 300 years. And at the very base of it most of the minor landlords were still Hindu. So there wasn’t really a mind set of needing ‘liberation’ in the Hindu populace. It’s important to remember that they would resist forced conversion but such things had become very rare until Aurangzeb was crowned Emperor.


That’s fair about the butterflies.


They were so used to their Muslim rulers that today Hindus and Muslims live in harmony with each other and the legacy of Muslim rulers is a largely a positive, unifying an non controversial one where no one dies about riots having to do with Tipu Sultan being honours or not. Temporarily accepting the situation as an impoverished peasant but teaching your children about their evils and those who convert versus accepting the rulers is very different.
 
That’s fair about the butterflies.


They were so used to their Muslim rulers that today Hindus and Muslims live in harmony with each other and the legacy of Muslim rulers is a largely a positive, unifying an non controversial one where no one dies about riots having to do with Tipu Sultan being honours or not. Temporarily accepting the situation as an impoverished peasant but teaching your children about their evils and those who convert versus accepting the rulers is very different.

I’m not saying that it was a completely harmonious society. Nor am I justifying Tipu Sultan or Hyder Ali’s actions (as far as I am concerned they were both two timing bastards). But for many ’impoverished’ peasants (the average peasant in the 1500s in India had a much higher income than a European or Chinese one, given that they weren’t serfs but actually paid land tenures) a Muslim was someone that lived in distant and secluded communities if you were in the countryside or in the courts of kings and Emperors. The majority of cross cultural interaction happened in the cities until the 1800s when the conversion rate tripled and simply leaving your village to form a new community of Muslims wasn’t an option any more.

The Marathas were not seen as invaders nor as liberators but simply a more cordial set of overlords. Whilst they would have implemented a more traditional, non Indo-Persian style of architecture and politics, the majority of the people in the north would much rather have had the Sikh Empire under Ranjit Singh ruling over them or a Rajput hegemony of states. Someone that wouldn’t seek to impose new cultural norms and a new language like eh Marathas did.
 
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